Posts tagged with "Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation":

The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF), a non-profit dedicated to "changing the culture of the building industry, for women, through education and research," just announced that after a national search it has chosen a new executive director: James T. Hanley, formerly the senior associate director of development at Barnard College. Hanley has undergraduate and advanced degrees in architecture along with an MBA and an MA in Art History and claims he will use his "skills in program development and financial management to broaden the role of the organization throughout the United States.”
Beverly Willis, the founder of BWAF, said that Hanley is "keenly aware of the issues encountered by women in the design industry" which will "enable BWAF to build on its prior successes and help women achieve their professional and personal goals through our programs and outreach."
Under Hanley’s leadership, the organization is launching a number of new initiatives in 2014. These include the exploration of a program for women as emerging leaders and the impact of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) as factors in success. Another new initiative is “Built by Women: New York City,” a focused collection within the Foundation’s Dynamic National Archive (DNA), which BWAF plans to use as a pilot for similar projects for cities around the country. Finally In 2014, it will complete its project entitled “Women of 20th-Century American Architecture,” to highlight the contributions of 50 outstanding women who significantly shaped the built environment in America.

On Wednesday night, the Guggenheim brought together the women behind the man, and apparently the myth of Frank Lloyd Wright, in a program titled “The Architecture of Wright: Wright, Women & Narrative."
Co-organized with the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, the lecture was accompanied by the premiere of A Girl Is A Fellow Here: 100 Women Architects in the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, a 15-minute documentary film produced by the Foundation. Throughout his career, Wright employed over 100 women architects and designers, and the film focuses on the lives of six of these women, including Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts, Lois Gottlieb, Jane Duncombe, Eleanore Petterson, and Read Weber, who worked alongside Wright during his prolific career from his Oak Park offices to Taliesin West.Through their work and words, the film reveals what each woman learned from their time with Wright, what they took with them, and how they went on to become established architects in their own right. From splitting wood, to laying shingles, drafting, and designing, women were treated as equals under Wright. Given the opportunity of training and practice, the film shows, these women went from apprentices to partners and owners of their own firms, creating thousands of projects across the country.
While the film focused more specifically on the women and their role in the history of modern architecture (which unfortunately, for the most part, was overlooked until this documentary), the accompanying discussion, led by Suzannah Lessard with Carol Gilligan and Gwendolyn Wright, was structured around Wright. Using the documentary as a catalyst, the lecture delved into deeper issues of architectural narrative and how Wright’s autonomy often overshadowed his collaborative relationships, in this case, with the women he employed.
The film is scheduled to be released in mid-July, and will soon be available on the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation’s website.